For immediate release
June 11, 2012

Magkaisa Centre’s Summer Program

Toronto, ON—The Magkaisa Centre kicks off summer 2012 with a new round of its “Balik Ugat, Balik Komunidad/Back to the Roots, Back to the Community” (BUBK) workshop series under the general theme of Workers’ Struggles and Resistance. The workshop series will make headway into the upcoming North American conference “Workers’ Struggles amidst Neoliberal Globazation,” to be held in Toronto on August 11 and 12. Now the fifth of the Magkaisa Centre’s annual summer workshops, BUBK 2012 is a progression of the Centre’s critical education and analysis of issues affecting women, workers and youth in the Filipino Canadian community and beyond. Amidst the community’s intensifying marginalization in all aspects of Canadian society, BUBK will concretize the need to continue building a truly progressive movement that will blaze the path towards the community’s just and genuine settlement and integration in a country we now call home.

With the ever-increasing attacks of the neoliberal agenda of globalization, workers’ lives in Canada and all over the world are becoming more unstable and precarious. As these attacks escalate, it is women workers and workers of colour that are undeniably the most affected and the hardest hit. For the Filipino Canadian community, we are now Canada’s top source of temporary foreign workers, and for decades now, Canada’s largest source of live-in caregivers. 83% of live-in caregivers in Canada are Filipino women. As such, the workshop series will tackle the current economic crisis expressed through ongoing austerity measures, privatization, and cutbacks to essential public services. At the same time, unraveling the meaning behind the intensification of neo-liberal temporary labour programs and policies such as Canada’s Temporary Foreign Workers’ Program, the Live-in Caregiver Program and the Philippine Labour Export Policy.

Collectively conceptualized with an intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender at its core, BUBK 2012 will focus on understanding the history and struggles of workers in Canadian society and beyond. Through the Filipino Canadian community’s experiences and its progressive history of educating, mobilizing and organizing towards building a movement for social change, these workshops will concretely unify the theoretical with the practical. With dynamic workshops traversing from sessions facilitated by guest speakers from Montreal and Vancouver, a camping trip and a culminating cultural event titled“Roots, Rhymes and Resistance,” BUBK 2012 will surely be a collective and an emancipatory experience that will gear all participants to move our community’s struggle for a just and genuine settlement integration and the overall workers’ struggles forward.

Workshops’ dates and topics:

1. Session # 1: June 16, 2012
Canada’s capitalist development, economic needs and the use of immigrant labour, Part 1

2. Session # 2: June 23, 2012
Canada’s capitalist development, economic needs and the use of immigrant labour, Part 2

3. Session # 3: June 30-31 2012 – Camping Trip
Living in the Age of Austerity, the future of young workers in Canadian society

4. Session # 4: July 7, 2012
Holding half of the Sky: Women under Capitalism

5. Session # 5: July 14, 2012
Capitalism in Crisis: Current Resistance Movements and building Genuine International Solidarity

6. Session # 6: July 28, 2012
Roots, Rhymes and Resistance RRR

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For more information, contact:
Ken Santos
(416) 519-2553
ukpc-on@magkaisacentre.org
www.magkaisacentre.org
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